Broken river, p.28
Broken River, page 28
“Open!” a man is bellowing, as though this will work, “open it!,” followed by more pounding. It’s a heavy door—Sam noticed this coming in—but if they want it to open, it will be opened.
(The Observer is aware that a nexus of narrative possibility, the last in this skein of cause and effect, is now approaching: choices that can be made, outcomes that will result. As the seconds go by, paths pass in and out of existence; probabilities shift from one path to another. If these were visual phenomena, they might register as flickers, jumps, as in the completion of a high-voltage electrical circuit or, slowed a thousandfold, the movement of floodwater through a landscape that both guides the water’s movement and is altered by its force. If it were aural, this dynamism might manifest as crackles that give way to a rumble or hum, like the cascading action of an earthquake, or the starting of an engine, or the illusion, to the human ear, of repeated unpitched pulses resolving into a musical note.
But,) “Stay here,” Karl says in a normal, disconcertingly calm speaking voice, and he gets up from the floor.
“Daddy!” Irina stage-whispers. Sam has never heard her utter this word.
“Stay!” is the stern response. Sam feels him stepping over them; he moves a few feet away, to where Sam thinks she remembers a work table. Irina throws both arms around her, squeezes her tightly. The pounding continues, then gives way to muttered conversation.
What is Karl doing? She hears metal scrape against wood. Something hard and heavy falls to the floor. His faint shadow, cast by light through the high windows, crosses the room, an indeterminate distance away.
Even Sam screams when the shooting starts. At first she thinks they’re firing through the walls, trying to kill them that way. Then she realizes that they’re shooting the lock. Between shots, the men are shouting at each other. Sam envelops Irina with her body; she cannot get her arms far enough around the girl.
There is one more shot, and then all the noise stops. Sam hazards a peek around the corner of the forge.
The door has fallen open: a two-inch slice of dim light extends from ceiling to floor. A coatsleeve is visible through it, two bare hands clutching something. A gun.
Sam grips Irina tighter, willing her to silence. There’s a click, and the lights come on. Sam closes her eyes. The door creaks, three slow footsteps sound, and a man’s voice says, “Where the fuck—”
Then there’s a gunshot, but it is so huge in the room, it seems to come from everywhere at once. Sam is deafened; then the silence gives way to a high, pure sine wave, a test tone. Through it she can she hear something soft and heavy hitting the floor, and a metallic clatter against the concrete. Sam opens her eyes. She can see past the corner of the forge to where a massive human arm the size of an entire child is flung out on the cement, and a few feet beyond it, a pistol. Beyond that is the work table, and Karl is visible behind it, his dark eyes, frightened and determined and bloodshot, peeking over the top.
Through the ringing in her ears, Sam hears Irina’s quiet weeping. She is trying to be quiet, but she just can’t. Against the concrete sounds a footstep, and then another. “Hey,” says a man’s voice she thinks she recognizes, gentler this time. She can’t see him. But she can still see Karl behind the table, and she realizes, with growing horror, that he is about to do something.
It is now clear to the Observer that one narrative line, that of the man Karl, is about to come to an end. It wonders when, exactly, this outcome—the one that is imminent—became inevitable: was it when he read his wife’s books, here in the studio, and in so doing rekindled, or perhaps kindled for the first time, feelings of familial responsibility? Or was it when he bought the bag of herbal intoxicants from the girl Sam, which have now aroused, in his racing mind, a heightened sense of paranoia and an inflated confidence in his own physical prowess? Or was it when he hired Sam as Irina’s babysitter? Or was the die cast earlier than all that: when Karl selected this house as the future site of his marriage and career rehabilitation, or when he chose the path of faithlessness in his union with Eleanor, or when he compelled her to enjoy sexual intercourse with him without the use of a birth control apparatus, or when he decided to attend art school, or when he fell in, at the age of seventeen, with the adult woman of twenty-five who would teach him how to have sex, or when he learned to masturbate, at the age of thirteen, or when he drew his first picture, at the age of one, with a crayon on a piece of butcher paper at the table in his parents’ apartment?
Perhaps, in the future, these are questions that, in other circumstances involving other human beings, the Observer will be able to answer. For now, though, it cannot; for now it can only watch the man Karl prepare to blunder toward the completion of his story. He is trembling now, crouched behind his work table, clutching a glass-bladed knife in his hand; he draws silent breaths and his jaw twitches as his pupils constrict against the sudden light, and he thinks:
Because of course this was always what you were going to do. Because one minute you’re gooned on grass and reading your wife’s unfinished novel you scammed from her backup drive; and the next you’re crouched in the dark with the weapon you forged, gripped in your cold hand; and the cuts healing on your back are itching like mad, pushing you forward; and you have no fucking idea what is going on except that there are enemies and they have found you and shots have been fired. Because you’re a shitty father and because you had a shitty father. Because being a sculptor is, in retrospect, fucking stupid. Because you didn’t defend yourself when you were six and the neighbor twins stole your bike. Because you didn’t defend yourself when you were eight and Pete Nagel pissed on you on the school bus. Because you didn’t defend yourself when you were eleven and Todd Clark pushed you into the lockers and told you that you were forbidden from using the first-floor boys’ room ever again, and you never used the first-floor boys’ room ever again. Because you tried to defend yourself when you were twelve and Kevin Drangle pushed you over and emptied your backpack into the mud and you didn’t get in even a single punch because he pushed you back down laughing and said if you got up he’d shoot you with a bow and arrow through your bedroom window. Because you didn’t defend Heather Giselson when you were both fifteen and Nathan Johnson spat on her, and though she said that wasn’t the reason when she dumped you a week later, of course it was the fucking reason. Because you didn’t defend your mother when you were twenty and your father called her that crazy bitch at a celebratory dinner for his third wife who had just gotten a PhD in semantics and everybody laughed as though getting a fucking PhD in semantics was less crazy than anything your mother ever did in her life. Because you thought your wife was a hack until the other day. Because you are a fucking pussy, and your moment has come. Because you are an animal, and before you stands an animal, and you were both brought here to kill. That is why you stand up, joints cracking, and scream, and lunge forward screaming with the knife out in front of you like a blazing torch to light the way toward life or death, and that is why the guy takes one step back, then another, his face inhuman with what you belatedly recognize as terror, and you manage to think that maybe none of this had to happen as you collide with him, sink the knife in until it strikes bone, then feel the hot bite of metal on your scalp and the world explodes and the hand of god comes from out of nowhere to stop you in your tracks and grip you in its fingers made of sky and lay you gently, firmly, on the ground where you belong.
It is baffling to the Observer, the things they do, the patterns they create that they inhabit and re-create again and again. They find one another so irresistible, even when enmity is the form their affinity takes. Over and over they come together, and if they fail to derive pleasure from these encounters, they find satisfaction in suffering. They are more attached, perhaps, to their suffering than to their pleasure.
This stands in direct contradiction to their stated goals, which are those of comity, happiness, calm. But it is pain that gives their lives meaning.
Pain is not something the Observer understands. It has not experienced corporeality, but it sees that conceptual disharmony can lead, eventually, to physical harm and deformation. The body reacts to mental disturbance—it shapes itself according to the mind’s instructions. And of course the humans can inflict bodily harm upon one another, sometimes reluctantly or even accidentally, sometimes with great eagerness. A penchant for inflicting bodily harm invites harm done to the self—and thus the hunger for pain is satisfied.
Four of them are here, in this room: the three who concealed themselves, locked themselves away and out of sight, and the one who pursued them. The man called Joe is dead. He was shot by the one called Louis, who has fled through the open door, clutching his arm where the knife went in, and disappeared into the cold night. Joe’s body is like a sleeping infant’s blown up to gargantuan proportions. His left hand is trapped beneath the ruined head from which blood is still emerging, and his gun lies on the cement, inches from his splayed right arm.
The man named Karl is also dead, killed in much the same way as Joe, and his body, too, lies facedown on the cement, emptying itself of blood.
The young woman Sam is doubled over with grief, or nausea, or both, and her eyes are squeezed shut. The Observer does not wish to intrude upon her thoughts now. Better simply to watch. Sam clutches herself, emits a high, quiet sound, takes in breath in great, ragged gasps. But then she straightens; her arms fall to her sides, her eyes open. An expression of resolve hardens on her face. She crouches beside the girl, Irina, who has made herself small on the floor in much the manner of the child who, more than a decade ago, survived the killings Joe performed. Sam tells the girl not to look, to keep her hand, both hands, over her eyes, and Irina agrees with a nod. The blood from Joe’s body is encroaching into their shared space behind the forge; it is time to move. Sam pulls Irina to her feet, adds her hand to the mask of Irina’s own, and guides the girl around the bodies, out the door, and into the falling snow.
Now the Observer drifts out of the room and into the woods, where the man Louis is running blindly, tripping over roots and fallen branches, whimpering, trying to suppress, with his inadequate fingers, the hemorrhaging of blood from his wounded arm. His teeth chatter; his body shakes. He is holding the knife, dark with his own blood, which he had the presence of mind to remove from the crime scene. He appears both to be in shock and extremely cold. The heavy snow is already filling his footprints. The Observer rises above the trees, charting Louis’s likely trajectory, teasing out the strongest (and growing ever stronger) vector of probability: he will cross that creek, dropping the knife into it on the way. He will break into that house on the other side of the rise and bind his wound with rags; he will walk along the road, ducking into the trees whenever a car passes, until he reaches the closed gas station, to which he will gain access through a weak panel in the rotting garage door. There, he will sleep for a few furtive hours, and in the morning he will manage to hitchhike to the bus station with a drunk woman in flight from the abusive husband she will return to days later. The woman won’t think to alert police to the passage through her life of a shivering man bleeding through a bundle of rags. Such events are not remarkable, or even memorable, in her world. She won’t ever hear of the killings. She will die of a heart attack before long. The gas station owner, similarly, will discover the hole in his garage door, attribute it to junkies or kids, repair it with a square of plywood, and forget all about it. He’ll learn of the killings in the house over the rise but won’t connect them with his break-in, or feel much concern about them at all. Some people get themselves killed. That’s their own business.
The Observer moves down the hill, to where the police officers have arrived, one man and one woman. They are young and uncertain. They stand beside the empty powder-blue car, which has indeed been parked at the bottom of the drive, blocking it, for some time. Nearly an inch of snow has fallen upon it; the hood, still radiating heat, remains clear, but not for long. The officers have been told to wait for reinforcements. They are waiting for reinforcements. It doesn’t matter anymore, though their inaction may eventually have some consequences, ones the Observer cannot predict. Internal punishments inside the police organization. Feelings of guilt—pointless ones, because there is nothing they could have done upon arriving to prevent the two deaths.
The Observer no longer cares. It feels the lightness of not having to pay attention to events and people that no longer interest it. The earth recedes beneath it as it rises up into the snowstorm, in much the way that the events inside the studio, which just moments ago aroused such intense interest, have now receded from its attention. The Observer returns to the house where the young man and woman were shot in the cellar. The house is surrounded by police cars, lights flashing. Police surround, mark, and photograph the bodies downstairs, in the room filled with artificial light and living vegetation. Other police, upstairs, interrogate the bereaved partygoers, writing down their statements in notebooks. To the humans, these deaths represent instances of chaos that must be investigated, explained, understood. The Observer has no such obligation now. It turns now to the city to the south. The wife of Karl, the woman named Eleanor, is here, lying in a quiet white room, in a building of a hundred other rooms like it. She is unconscious. Another woman sits beside her, holding her hand—it is Karl’s lover, Rachel. The lover does not belong here, she feels—she barely knows the dying woman. She has tried to contact Karl but couldn’t reach him. The situation, however, brings her a sad kind of satisfaction. She is fulfilling a need. A social need, at this point, more than a personal one; for the woman, Eleanor, has no awareness of the other woman’s presence here, nor any sense of how she arrived here, or even where she is. Inside Eleanor’s mind, dreams are unfolding, or perhaps memories. The difference between the two is unclear to the Observer; they are so similar. The Observer can sense the mind trying to ascribe meaning, to create it and contextualize it. Even unconscious, the mind is burdened by this imperative. Eleanor is sitting on a wooden bench near a fountain in a city. The fountain is in front of her—it seems enormous, like a public swimming pool, though she has been instructed not to climb into it, or even to drag her hand through it, because it’s filled with bacteria. Other children are running around it, splashing one another, and she feels pity for them, for the illnesses they’re likely to contract as a result of this play. Between the fountain and her bench, a large number of pigeons are clustered; they are pecking at the ground where a passing old man has scattered seeds. On a nearby bench, her mother and aunt are sitting, talking. They’re speaking in low tones, as though privately, but she can hear their voices very clearly, above the noise of the children and splashing water and traffic on the street that runs past this plaza. The conversation they’re having is about Eleanor and her husband, or rather her fiancé, for they are not yet married, though Eleanor is pregnant with his child. This can’t be so, because in this scene Eleanor is still a child herself, and she hasn’t met her husband yet, or ever even yet conceived of having sex with a man; she’s barely five. Yet she hears them saying:
“I don’t think she’s strong enough.”
“Strong how?”
“Not physically I mean, not her body—I’m afraid having a child will break her mentally. She’s not ready.”
“You weren’t much older.”
“I was different. It was a different time. I was married. She’s fragile.”
“He could be a good father. You never know.”
“He’s useless, of course. He’s a philanderer—I overheard her talking to her friend.”
“He’s charming, I’ll give him that.”
“You can’t charm a clean diaper onto a baby.”
“Ha!”
“This will sound terribly narcissistic, but I feel as though it’s all a repudiation. It’s her way of showing us.”
“There’s some truth to that, I’d imagine.”
“She’s always been headstrong. She’ll do it her way, even if it isn’t the best way, or any way at all.”
“Look at her now,” Eleanor’s aunt says, “she’s afraid of the pigeons.”
As her aunt speaks these words, Eleanor realizes that it’s true—the pigeons have eaten the seeds they were given and have approached her bench, expecting more. They surround her, milling about, bobbing their heads, rarely looking directly at her. But their expectations are clear, and she fears that they will hop up onto the bench with her, then onto her lap. They, too, carry disease, according to her mother. Eleanor pulls her legs up, crosses them under her skirt, and the birds fill the space her feet occupied; they’re under and behind and around the bench now. The plaza’s masonry is a strange color, a dark green arranged in a pattern of diamonds, mortared by thick lines of gold. The pigeons make a sound, a low burbling; their feathers rustle against each other. The rustling is strangely amplified, displaced; it’s like it is happening right beside her head, right there at her ear.
But no, that sound isn’t coming from the pigeons but from Irina’s hands, moving in her sleep—they’re in bed together in Brooklyn, it’s a Saturday morning. Irina is lying on her side, half-curled like a cat; her arms are crossed at the wrist, and the hands lie on the pillow between their faces, writhing in a constant, evolving motion. She is two. Karl is off somewhere. Not in the bed, anyway. Eleanor is fully awake now, perceiving the strange spectacle of her daughter’s hands. It’s like a sign language—the motions aren’t jerky, they’re fluid, practiced—and she wonders if they mean something, if each movement is a word or letter or idea, if Irina is expressing something from her dream, in a form her mind has devised specifically for this occasion and will permanently forget when the dream has ended. There is something about this experience that is too rich, too frightening and beautiful, and Eleanor closes her eyes and rolls onto her back, and when she opens them Craig is there above her, she’s in his bed in Manhattan where he has brought her for sex, and she focuses on the soft gray and blond hairs on his chest as he moves into and through her. She recognizes that he is a sad man, lonely, though he is beautiful and moneyed and would be the first to admit few human beings born to this earth are luckier. And yet it’s his sadness that attracts her, probably attracts most of the assistants he sleeps with, it’s something that makes her feel grown-up to recognize and appreciate. It feels good to give a man something that he wants that won’t turn into an obligation. The beauty of Craig was that he appreciated everything that happened as it was happening and never betrayed any disappointment when it ended, whether it was a good meal or a professional relationship with one of his writers or half an hour in bed with a woman half his age.
